speak of the Indians without distinction as idolaters, contrasting them with the Mahomedans of India. In the Calcutta Gazette of 1816, Raja Rammohan Roy, the learned opponent of Hindu idolatry, the Erasmus of the new era, is called the discoverer of theism in the sacred books of the Hindus. Rammohan Roy himself disclaimed the title, but writing in 1817, he speaks of "the system of idolatry into which Hindus are now completely sunk."[71] Many learned brahmans, he says in the same pamphlet, are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idol worship, indicating that the knowledge belonged only to the scholars. His own object, he said, was to declare the unity of God as the real thought of the Hindu Scriptures. Across India, on the Bombay side, we find clear evidence of the state of opinion among the middle class in 1830, from the report of a public debate on the Christian and Hindu religions. The antagonists were, on the one side, the Scottish missionary Dr. John Wilson and others, and on the other side two leading officials of the highest Government Appellate Court, men who would now rank as eminent representatives of the educated class.
One of these demanded proof that there was only one God.[72]
The beginning of the nineteenth century.
Monotheistic belief a broadening wedge between pantheism and polytheism.
Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy's evidence that in 1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one Supreme God. "Debased and despicable," he writes, "as is the belief of the Hindus in three hundred and thirty millions of gods, they (the learned) pretend to reconcile this persuasion with the doctrine of the unity of God, alleging that the three hundred and thirty millions of gods are subordinate agents assuming various offices and preserving the harmony of the universe under one Godhead, as innumerable rays issue from one sun."[73] Turning to testimony of a different kind, we find Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834 and 1838. "The great majority of the population," he writes, "consists of idolaters." Macaulay's belief was that idolatry would not survive many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the century the sphere
of idolatry and polytheism has been limited. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India. The founding of the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association in 1828 by Rammohan Roy has already been called the commencement of an indigenous theistic church outside the transplanted theism of Indian Christianity and Indian Mahomedanism. Strictly rendered, the divine name Brahmā, adopted by the Brāhmas, expresses the pantheistic idea that God is the One without a second, not the theistic idea of one personal God; but what we are concerned with is, that it was in the monotheistic sense that Rammohan Roy adopted the term. To him Brahmā was a personal God, with whom men spoke in prayer and praise. As a matter of fact the pantheistic formula, "One only, no second," occurs in the creeds of all three new monotheistic bodies, Brāhmas, Prārthanā Samājists, and Āryas, but in the same monotheistic sense. The original Sanscrit of the formula (Ekam eva advityam), three
words from the Chhāndogya Upanishad, is regularly intoned (droned) in the public worship of Brāhmas. Like a wedge between the polytheism of the masses below and the pantheism of the brahmanically educated above, there came in this naturalised theism, a body of opinion ever widening as modern education enlarges its domain. It is one of the events of Indian history. Now, pantheistic in argument and polytheistic in domestic practices as educated Hindus still are, they never call themselves pantheists, and would resent being called polytheists; they call themselves theists. "Every intelligent man is now a monotheist," writes the late Dr. John Murdoch of Madras, an experienced observer.[74] "Many" (of the educated Hindus), says a Hindu writer, "—I may say most of them—are in reality monotheists, but monotheists of a different type from those who belong to the Brāhma Samāj. They are, if we may so call them, passive monotheists.... The influence of the Hindu environment is as much perceptible in them as that of the Christian environment."[75] Professor Max Müller and Sir M. Monier Williams are of the same opinion. "The educated classes
look with contempt upon idolatry.... A complete disintegration of ancient faiths is in progress in the upper strata of society. Most of the ablest thinkers become pure Theists or Unitarians."[76] That change took place within the nineteenth century, a testimony to the force of Christian theism in building up belief, and to the power of the modern Indian atmosphere to dissipate irrational and unpractical beliefs. For, in contact with the practical instincts of Europe, the pantheistic denial of one's own personality—a disbelief in one's own consciousness, the thought that there is no thinker—was bound to give way, as well as the irrational polytheism. Very unphilosophical may have been Lord Byron's attitude to the idealism of Berkeley: "When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, 'twas no matter what he said." But that represents the modern atmosphere which New India is breathing, and it is fatal to pantheism.
The spread of monotheism traced.
It is interesting to note how monotheism spread. The Brāhma Samāj of Madras was founded in 1864, theistic like the mother society, the Brāhma Samāj of Bengal. Three years later the first of similar bodies on the west side of India was founded, the Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer